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Indie Filmmakers Feel Heavy Hand of Beijing

An audience in a private art studio during the 9th Beijing Independent Film Festival in Songzhuang, an arts district in Beijing.Credit
Sean Gallagher for The International Herald Tribune

BEIJING — Independent filmmaking is tough anywhere in the world, but in China, especially, it is not a vocation for the faint of heart.

A recent attempt to hold a festival of independent film at a public art gallery in front of 500 people was thrown into chaos after a power failure in the middle of the first screening.

Although the authorities denied any interference in the Ninth Beijing Independent Film Festival last month, organizers said local officials had warned them not to show the opening film, “Egg and Stone,” directed by Huang Ji, which is about sexual abuse in a rural family, in a public space. When the power went out, officials showed up and apologized, but then did nothing, witnesses said.

Guests leaving the interrupted opening Aug. 18 said that unidentified men had followed them, asking why they had been there.

Whatever the truth, filmmaking free of the ruling Communist Party is discouraged. The Film Bureau, part of the State Administration of Radio, Film and Television, vets scripts, grants production licenses, controls studios and equipment and coordinates releases. Making a film without approval risks harassment, warnings and, in extreme cases, blacklisting, a caution to others not to work with offenders.

Independent film took off in the late 1990s in China with the importing of inexpensive, compact digital technology, freeing filmmakers to experiment in private without bulky film cameras drawing unwanted attention. Today, high-definition digital cameras cost even less and are smaller, bolstering eager users’ ability to tell stories their own way.

This independent spirit comes at a time when mainstream films are booming in China. In 2011, ticket sales jumped 30 percent to hit $2.1 billion and are expected to surpass Japanese sales by January, making China Hollywood’s largest export box office.

On Aug. 8, the “Avatar” director James Cameron announced that his cutting-edge technology would serve the state-run China Film Group in making a 3-D docudrama about the history of Beijing.

Despite an annual cap of 34 foreign films allowed to recoup a portion of sales in China each year, Hollywood’s dominance is so great that Chinese-language films accounted for only 35 percent of box office receipts from January through June, as titles like Mr. Cameron’s “Titanic 3D” dominated. Meanwhile, even some independent Chinese directors like Mr. Jia have turned to making more accessible films, conforming to state rules to reach the growing audience.

It is against this backdrop that independent filmmakers in China are trying to make themselves heard.

“We care so much about independent films exactly because we want to create a multicultural environment, not because we need to overthrow commercial films or emphasize the unique correctness of independent films,” Li Xianting, Beijing Independent Film Festival co-founder, said in an interview. “China’s a place where only the mainstream is emphasized and anything else shouldn’t exist.”

Undeterred by the scuttled festival opening, Mr. Li set up makeshift theaters in his nearby offices, where, for eight days, he showed 46 documentaries and 29 fiction films. Participants said that men they assumed to be plainclothes policemen had lingered outside.

“Though the government cut off our electricity and drove away a lot people, we still persist,” Mr. Li said, smiling as he quoted a Chinese saying that Mao had employed to foment revolution: “A single spark can start a prairie fire.”

Mr. Li is a longtime contemporary art curator who shifted his focus to setting up an independent film school in 2006, supported by private donors, including artists he once promoted. The festival is also privately financed.

The festival this year was the inaugural merger of two earlier independent festivals — one for documentaries that began in 2004 and one for features that started in 2006. Mr. Li said that the gatherings had attracted increased attention, both wanted and unwanted.

Last year, the documentary festival director, Zhu Rikun, canceled the event before it opened, citing official pressure and his concerns that filmmakers could get into trouble. His decision came one day after the state-run Beijing International Film Festival announced that it would include a documentary section in its first year.

This year, Mr. Li said that he and the festival manager, Zhang Qi, who drew on her previous experience at a state-run broadcaster in negotiating with local officials, discussed their plans with the authorities before the festival’s opening, arguing that film should be as free as other contemporary arts.

Mr. Li’s festival and two others, one in Nanjing in October and one in Chongqing in November — each with varying degrees of official participation — screen works by graduates of the Beijing Film Academy and other state schools. But they also increasingly accept films begun in workshops like Mr. Li’s, in the artists’ district of Songzhuang, and one in Caochangdi, another Beijing art district, home base to the dissident artist Ai Weiwei and the documentary filmmaker Wu Wenguang.

Now that China has half a billion Internet users, many filmmakers seek their audience online. But anything that is politically sensitive, like the 1989 military crackdown on the democracy movement in Tiananmen Square, risks being scrubbed from the Internet.

Still, independent filmmakers soldier on. One of Mr. Wu’s protégés at Caochangdi is Zou Xueping, 27, whose documentary “The Satiated Village” was shown at the Songzhuang festival last month. It centers on her elderly family members’ response to her earlier film, “The Starving Village,” which recorded their memories of the 1959-61 famine, a catastrophe that killed tens of millions and that the government attributes to natural disasters. Independent historians say that the famine resulted from Mao’s policies.

“If you didn’t make this film, who would?” one of Ms. Zou’s interviewees asks.

Ms. Zou is one of a legion of young filmmakers using digital tools to re-examine recent Chinese history. She is following in the footsteps of Mr. Wu’s 1990 underground documentary “Bumming in Beijing: The Last Dreamers,” which followed five artists immediately after the crushing of the Tiananmen protests.

“There’s an important aspect of the need to speak truth to power in Chinese documentary,” said Angela Zito, an anthropology professor at New York University who showed “The Satiated Village” there last year and who introduced her own debut documentary, about Chinese calligraphers, last month at the Songzhuang festival.

“These young Chinese documentary filmmakers are inspiring to me personally to charge out into the world and record it. Their appearance, beginning in the early 1990s was refreshing, because they’re beholden to no one,” Ms. Zito said. She said that “an entire amateur wave” of Chinese filmmakers was “limited” because state schools did not teach the independent thinking required to edit. “This kind of systematic craft knowledge is available through Li’s ‘school’ and through the collective apprenticing that places like Wu’s provide.”

Also trying to help the Chinese independent filmmakers gathered in Songzhuang was Kevin Lee of dGenerate Films, who helped promote “Ghost Town,” a documentary about a village in the southwestern province of Yunnan, that had its premiere at the festival in 2009 before moving on to the New York Film Festival.

“Since these films can’t legally be sold in China, we help create streams of revenue that can go toward supporting future productions,” said Mr. Lee, whose company helps the films find buyers at museums, colleges and libraries outside China.

In 2010, dGenerate sponsored a workshop at an Apple store in Beijing where independent filmmakers taught iPhone and MacBook users about their craft. One instructor was Peng Tao, whose latest feature, “The Cremator,” about a dying mortician, is being shown at the Toronto International Film Festival, which began Thursday.

Mr. Li, who is 63, smiled as he noted that he had been born just before the founding of the People’s Republic of China in 1949. He said he was betting that the struggle to find a place for independent films in China might outlast him.

“It’s possible that independent film will get to a legal position in the market,” he said, “but I may no longer exist in this world at that time.”

A version of this article appears in print on September 11, 2012, on page B3 of the New York edition with the headline: China’s Independent Filmmakers Persist Despite Government Suppression. Order Reprints|Today's Paper|Subscribe